David Wong

“Sound filled the room, a crystal melody that could lift any human heart and turn away any devil.It was "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake.”

“Dave? This is John. Your pimp says bring the heroin shipment tonight, or he'll be forced to stick you. meet him where we buried the Korean whore. The one without the goatee."That was code. It meant "Come to my place as soon as you can, it's important.”

“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.”

“I noticed John had brought along a thermos of his coffee, this “favor” already qualifying as an all-nighter. I admit, the horrific burning sensation really did keep you awake.”

“Antidepressants. The thought of this girl actually being depressed made me want to grab the whole planet and throw it into the sun. Well, more than usual anyway.”

“I reached out and, with a small move of my body, did something that would change my life forever. I gently moved Amy aside and stepped down ahead of her, putting myself between her and the shadows.”

“Well, you’d better hope I am because the world was built by sociopaths, men willing to send a million innocent boys into battle to be chopped to screaming giblets, all so a banner can be raised over another piece of land with houses and markets and roads soon after.”

“You're the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.”

“Do they know they make the honey for you? Or do they work tirelessly because they think its their own choice?”

“Arnie sighed and for a quick moment looked genuinely sympathetic that someone could dream up something this elaborately sad.”

“Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.”

“I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can't fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it "sir" because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay”

“He had braces, sported a black Limp Bizkit Tshirt. Limp Bizkit is a band that was popular at the time. If you’re fortunate, you’ve never heard of them.”

“There is Normal Society and then there is the Abnormal Freaks Who Deserve Our Public Pity and Private Ridicule Society. The first is the world of good jobs and Christmas shopping and marriages and vacations and the scent of new cars. And then there is that other world, the world of the glazed eye, of people who chant at the moon and spout conspiracy theories and get sexually aroused by furry animal costumes. Some dress all in black to carry out vampire rituals and others col ect cats until they’re a furry shoulder-to-shoulder flood on every floor of the house. The Abnormal travel among the Normal and leave behind them a trail of sickeningly awkward conversations and stifled laughter, of hidden smirks and rolled eyes. And worst of all, pity.”

“Damn it! I knew she was a monster! John! Amy! Listen! Guard your buttholes.”

“My shame circuits burned out from overuse years ago.”

“Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love?”

“They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.”

“Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a human mind out of that iron cage of mistrust, is a sacrifice. The martyr who gives up everything, who abandons all personal gain, who lays down his life for the good of those outside his group. He becomes a symbol all can rally around. So instead of trying to make a selfish, violent primate somehow empathize with the whole world, which is impossible, you only need to get him to remember and love the martyr. As one is forgotten, another must replace it.”

“What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.”

“Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.”

“Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don't?”

“Cops do this every day, rifling closets and digging through your dildo drawer.”

“She burst into snakes.”

“Welcome to Undisclosed. DreamsInterpreted for Beer.”

“John flung himself into a pseudo-karate stance, one hand poised behind him and one in front, posed like a cartoon cactus. I thought for an odd moment he had moved his limbs so fast they had made that whoosh sound through air but then I realized John was making that sound with his mouth.”

“He whipped the chair around and actually split one of the things in half with the impact, spilling the spray of blood that was reflective, like mercury.John bellowed, "Anyone else want to donate blood to chair-ity?"He ducked into the the door and bashed one monster right in the wig, screaming, "There's some dessert! With a chair-y on top!”

“One more victim sucked in by John. You get into the room with him and you just fall into a warm pool of beer and video games and penis jokes, staring at the universe with him and saying, "Do you believe this shit?”

“Fuck all of you," John retorded. "You don't even exist. We're all just a figment of my cock's imagination.”

“Dave? This is John.""What are you-"Alive?"-in an ambulance or something?""Yes and no. Are you still at the police station?""Yeah. We were both-""Have I died yet?”

“Well, they never know they're ill, do they? You can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. So, I suppose you just feel normal and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.”

“I tried to say something cool, wound up stammering something like, “WANNA YOU WANNA WEENIE ME?” The end kind of trailed off in a shrill, choking warble.”

“The phrase 'sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist' suddenly flew through my mind.”

“I reached for the knob. At the same moment it began to melt and transform, turning pink and finally taking the shape of a flaccid penis. It flopped softly against the door, like a man was cramming it through the knob hole from the other side.I turned back to John and said, 'That door cannot be opened.”

“…all the king's doctors and all the king's pills couldn't make Frank's waking nightmares go away.”

“... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.”

“No. He says when you're dealing with any kids of supernatural beings, Gods and Devils and angels, you tend to think about them like hurricanes or earthquakes, some kind of mindless force of nature. But if they're real, then they have minds. They know your name. So even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows instantly he's being read about and that you're somebody he may have to deal with. And I'm thinking what you did in Vegas went way, way beyond that.""What 'I' did? What about us? We were both there.""Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy.”

“There are two types of people on planet Earth, Batman and Iron Man. Batman has a secret identity, right? So Bruce Wayne has to walk around every second of every day knowing that if somebody finds out his secret, his family is dead, his friends are dead, everyone he loves gets tortured to death by costumed supervillains. And he has to live with the weight of that secret every day. But not Tony Stark, he's open about who he is. He tells the world he's Iron Man, he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't have that shadow hanging over him, he doesn't have to spend energy building up those walls of lies around himself. You're one or the other - either you're one of those people who has to hide your real self because it would ruin you if it came out, because of your secret fetishes or addictions or crimes, or you're not one of those people. And the two groups aren't even living in the same universe.”

“My melon soulCrushed by your Gallagher of apathy”

“That's the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives A Fuck.”

“Tried to escape, to block out the fact that I was being eaten alive by arachnids. For some reason the only thing I could replace it with was the image of being eaten by tiny clowns.”

“John and I have made this stuff our hobby, in the way that an especially attractive prisoner makes a hobby out of not getting raped. Jesus, that’s a terrible analogy. I apologize. What I’m saying is that it’s self-preservation. We didn’t choose this, we just have talents that makes us the equivalent of that new guy in the cell block who has a slim, hairless body and kind of looks like a woman from behind, and has an incredibly realistic tattoo of boobs on his back. He may have no desire at all to ever even touch a penis, but it’s going to happen, even if it’s just in the process of frantically slapping them away. Jesus, am I still talking about this? [John—please delete the above paragraph before it goes off to the publisher].”

“The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.”

“SHUT UP. Both of you. You're coming with me." To me he said, "Put some pants on.""Fuck you. This is my house. I make the rules. You take your clothes off. John, get the Twister mat.”

“ANYBODY ORDER A JAILBREAK WITH A SIDE OF SHOTGUN?”

“Keep driving," said a soft voice in my ear. "She will not bite if you keep driving."Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking Captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck.”

“If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?”

“The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it'll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean.""Who's-""Because you're gay.”

“Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don't know what it is. Well I do. It's apathy. That's the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives a Fuck.”

“Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis’s penis would be larger than your penis.”